The Well-Hung Boy Next Door

Men aren't porn stars. Not really. They're extras. They're props. They're stand-ins for guys everywhere. But not Mr. James Deen. Just by being, well, average (or let's say larger than average), Deen has gotten huge (oops). And what's even stranger is who he's gotten huge with (hey, we didn't mean that): women, young women, and even teenage girls. Wells Tower spends a week with the man who would apparently have the best job in the world. (He doesn't)

It is a clement spring day in greater Los Angeles, and James Deen is driving through the soft green tumescences of the Calabasas hills on his way to a pornographic-movie shoot. If Deen betrays not a trace of anticipation, aversion, or excitement at the prospect of having sex on-camera today, it is because having sex on-camera is something the 26-year-old does more frequently than most of us use dental floss: "About 360 days a year" is Deen's offhand tally.

Deen's professional relentlessness has yielded a host of accolades. In 2009, when he was 23, the Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, pornography's Oscars, named Deen "Male Performer of the Year." (Deen was one of the youngest actors ever to be so decorated.) This on the heels of a similar distinction from the X-Rated Critics Organization, which in 2007 noted the arrival of a major talent with an "Unsung Swordsman" award.

Industry plaudits aside, Deen has managed an order of renown far rarer in the world of pornographic film: He is a male performer people actually know by name. According to Deen, 10,000 unique visitors peruse his blog every day. Women seem to like him. A recent Nightline segment alerted parents to Deen's crossover appeal among teenage girls, who, the piece warned, hold for Deen a place in their hearts alongside Timberlake and Bieber. (Anchor Terry Moran: "For any parent concerned about what their teen does online, the huge popularity of the young man you are about to meet may be deeply disturbing.")

A visit to the comments section of Deen's website appears to confirm Nightline's claims:

"Hey James :) I'm 16 years old and i love your work"

"hey (; have you EVER banged a teen latina ? e-mail me...."

"i would totally rock your world...mind you im 16 about to be 17."

Deen brakes his truck at the bottom of a steep gated driveway,which leads to a sprawling mansion that looks made of nougat. Its dominant interior materials are faux gilt, beveled glass, and plastic flora. The game room, which is as big as my house, contains dartboards, a pool table, and a saloon area with a neon sign reading ICE CREAM fid above the mirrored back bar. The house's real-life owner, one supposes, is a fabulously well-to-do 14-year-old.

But today the mansion's fictive owner is James Deen himself, who has been cast in the role of a priapic millionaire with a gambling problem. The shoot is for a company called Digital Playground, which claims to specialize in "high-end" pornography for couples—"vanilla porn," as hard-raunch aficionados dub DP's output.

"As far as making visually stimulating erotic cinema, Digital Playground's pretty much the best," says Deen. "Personally, I hate it. It's too pretty. When I'm watching adult, I don't care about the lighting. I want to see dirty, nasty: Rocco Siffredi"—an Italian porn star known for full-contact choreographies in which he dragoons pretty ladies into tonguing his caboose.

Over the next seven days, Deen will exercise his full array of talents and preferences on seven projects in three cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas. I will be riding shotgun in Deen's utterly bitching pumpkin orange off-road-package Ford F-150 Raptor, watching him work, and trying to make sense of his extraordinary life.

I have many questions:

First off, brooking so much unremitting daily friction, how has James Deen's penis not been stropped to raw liver? "I don't know. I guess I've got pretty thick skin."

How does he keep his houseplants alive with so much travel? He doesn't. All the plants in Deen's 4,200-square-foot home in the San Fernando Valley have died.

Gosh, but mustn't Deen have an astonishing collection of venereal diseases? He and his colleagues undergo testing every month. Deen claims, incredibly, to never have had a test come back "dirty."

Does he gobble Viagra like popcorn? Certainly not. His erections are 100 percent organic and pharma-free.

A good portion of Deen's oeuvre consists of rather not-nice stuff: spitting, whipping, choking, slapping, etc. Is there anything he won't do on-camera? He will not have sex with someone who is unwilling to have sex with him. He will not have sex with men. He will not dress as a clown and have sex with someone; nor will he permit someone dressed as a clown to have sex with him. Clowns make James Deen uncomfortable.

Isn't this sort of career exhausting physically, spiritually? Doesn't he sometimes wish he'd picked another calling? No indeed. He loves his work. He'd do it even if he weren't getting paid: "My life is pretty awesome."

Lastly, a silent query to the nation's gentlemen, we who have spent many otherwise productive hours pondering what it would be like to be able to bed an infinite rotating population of beautiful women: If given the chance, would we live Deen's dream? For a day? For a week? Yes? We shall see.

···

Losing Kayden is the working title of today's film. Its centerpiece is an actress by the name of Kayden Kross, a wholly winning and improbably bookish young woman who reads the short fiction of David Foster Wallace between takes. The crew is far more substantial, congenial, and pro-seeming than one expected. There's no more ambient prurience than you'd find at an ad shoot for Windex.

A little after dusk, Deen is summoned to his first scene, a non-nude narrative load bearer in which he loses his mansion in a poker game with a gangster. Handling the role of the crime boss is a creepy German actor in his middle years named Steve Holmes, now parked at the card table. He wears a pair of granddad-ish EZ-reader glasses and below them a seedy mustache-and-goatee combo, and far below that a pair of dark trousers from whose open fly depends something like a turkey's wattle.

The third factor in the scene is a blonde 19-year-old named Allie James. Earlier, when I asked Allie James what she'd be up to today, she replied, "I'll be crawling around under a table sucking cock."

Allie joined the industry six months ago after fleeing the family farm in upstate New York. With the exception of Steve Holmes, she's the only person on the set who flaunts her zeal for the erotic when the camera is not rolling. She roams the mansion with her shirt hiked up over her breasts. While the other scenes were being shot, neither Deen nor any of the other talent were the least bit interested in watching the action, but Allie liked to perch on the sidelines, insouciantly masturbating and checking her Facebook page and also chewing the heck out of some gum.

While the crew is dragging lighting rigs and attending to last-minute particulars, James takes a seat at the poker table with Allie and Steve. Allie perches on Steve's engorged lap. Steve gets an idea: Wouldn't it be diverting if Allie James were to pose for a photograph with Steve's penis in her mouth, which Steve could text to Allie's mother?

__

She kneels. He snaps. "He's gonna send it to my mom!" Allie cries with apparent delight.

"I want to fuck them both," Steve Holmes explains, punching Allie's mother's number into his phone.

With minutes to go until go time, the cast talks shop. In response to a conversation starter I do not catch, Allie relates a childhood memory, the gist of which is that when she was 9 years old, hanging out with her brothers, she was encouraged to perform sexual acts for their friends in exchange for marijuana.

Now Deen looks up from his telephone for the first time in quite a while.

"And you were cool with it?"

"Oh, yeah," says Allie James.

Deen hoists his eyebrows. "As long as you were cool with it," he says.

"Okay, okay, let's focus!" booms the director, Robby D., an imposing, fearsomely bald man. The time for horseplay is at an end. It is time for acting now. "So on ‘Action,'you guys are playing poker—and you," he says to Allie, "you start sucking his dingy."

Click goes the little scene-marker guillotine, the "sticks."

The scene takes halting shape after Deen brooks a surprisingly rigorous Stanislavsky-ing from Robby D. ("Try to find the character. He's a gambling addict. Nervous, edgy. Take your time. Check out the blow job.") Meanwhile, over by the ice cream bar, the crew reviews the tape and sniggers. Allie's blow job is deemed "horrible," for, as far as I can follow the logic, a dearth of audible gagging sounds. But anyway, it's not an important blow job—just some ornamental side action to mitigate the scene's dull plot load. The scene is a keeper. So while the crew sets up the next shot, Allie James fetches some paper towels and sponges up the squalid whey that has pooled about her knees.

Several hours later, after midnight, Deen is finally summoned to perform. His scene is in an upstairs bedroom with Kayden Kross, who really does look lovely in her pink top and purple bra. Deen and Kross are old friends. Deen was not her first scene, but he was her third some years ago. On the heels of Allie James's unheartwarming ministrations, James and Kayden seem sweet, natural, and eager to hump for reasons having to do with actual interpersonal fondness.

They run through a bit of dialogue concerning James's gambling problem and then collide. James disrobes in medias. Nude, he looks even tinier than his elfin five feet eight. His body is about like an eighth grader's. His penis is smaller than a baguette.

"You been working out?" Robby asks between takes.

"No," says James.

"I didn't think so."

It's true—no rippling sinews are visible on James Deen's body. There are probably 12-year-old girls who could take him in a fight. And this, Deen tells me, is partly the secret of his success. He is not the traditional porno man, no overbulked squat-thruster spray-broasted from the Darque Tan booth. He is sort of wimpy-looking. With luminous blue eyes and well-structured, stubble-flocked cheekbones, he is handsome, but in an everyday, non-Hollywood way. "Not horrible to look at" is how Deen describes his appearance. "I'm like a guy a chick might actually meet in a bar."

That Deen's very ordinariness is somehow a virtue in the industry is, one could argue, a symptom of pornography's journey from unsanitary movie theaters and paper-windowed bookstores to every computer screen the free world over. A theory: Back in the days when the culture could pretend that porn was being exclusively consumed by sex criminals and raincoaters, viewing pornography was actually a multilayered form of voyeurship. The chief thrill was, of course, watching people screw, but salting that thrill was a Lovelace-ian paratext of unhappiness, addiction, disease, etc. The fact that the performers were doomed and loathed, if hypocritically, by mainstream culture made them more exciting to watch. That female performers should be made to couple with satanic reptiles like John Holmes or Ron Jeremy was just, fitting, gross, and perversely harmonious with the moral aesthetic of the age.

In the 1980s and '90s, the grodiness of the male talent migrated somewhat, from Holmes-style Swamp Things to steroidal Fabioids. But still, the pornographic fantasy seemed to be happening among people not exactly of our species, on a planet where nude women languish in wait for pizza men who look like courtiers from Castle Grayskull.

So enter the present age, when almost everyone is watching porn (two in five U.S. Internet users—125 million—visit an adult site each month), when American porn sites reportedly receive 28,000 unique hits every second, when the AVN estimates that a third of consistent porn viewers are women. Now that pretty much every man (if not woman and child) is watching porn, there is at last demand for a pornographic Everyman in the form of James Deen, whose regular dudeness acknowledges that his world is our world and our world is Planet Porn.

Anyway, sorry for talking while you're trying to concentrate. Back at it: Deen does away with Miss Kross's panties. She spread-eagles on the edge of the bed, and Deen commences a kalimba move on her vulva. Then comes what I soon recognize as Deen's default prelude: a deft bit of multitasking in which he launches into a cunnilinctory overture with his legs in a sprinter-at-the-blocks posture. This affords him latitude to hand-crank himself rigid below the camera frame. Small and swart, snacking avidly on Miss Kross, Deen vaguely favors the incubus in Fuseli's The Nightmare.

After a brief interval of manual pump priming, he breaks off the oral business, which now, in its frantic lateralness, has begun to resemble an impassioned harmonica solo. The derricking begins. Kayden Kross is posed in a swastika of shapely limbs. He toils, leans his face into hers, and the two murmur to each other in a guttural lock-jawed patois intelligible to no one but themselves. Every now and then, the two of them break into heliated laughter, as though to say, "All of this grunting and grasping and fuck-me fuck-me porno jabber is a bit absurd, isn't it? But jeepers, chum, it really is awfully nice to be having sex with you."

"I wish I got to stick my dick in some chick's fuckin' pussy," one of the crew members reflects bitterly. This attitude is perhaps shared by readers at home. But it soon becomes clear why neither the cameraman nor you nor I will ever get to have our trousers off near Miss Kross.

After several frictive minutes, the action stops. The still photographer comes in and for fifteen minutes or so arranges James and Kayden into assorted tableaux, and all the while James's gizmo stands as steadfast as the Chrysler Building. Then the action resumes, only this time it's for a soft-core version (inside factoid: The blue movies you see on late-night cable? The actors are actually having sex), followed by another ten minutes or so of intimate strife and moanery, before they at last go back to the full and flagrant penetrative churn. Finally Robby calls, "Okay, let's bring it home. BJ, then pop."

And cut. "I got come up my nose and my eyeball," Kayden says in a tone not of displeasure. "It was so good. I love James."

And James? Would he work with her again, someone asks.

"Fuck no," he says.

Kayden snorts in mock umbrage. "I'll rape you if you don't."

···

At 2:30 a.m., Losing Kayden is pronounced a wrap. The crew coils cable. While the cast goes home, Deen heads to his ginormous pickup truck and sets a course for San Francisco, where he is needed on set twelve hours from now. A journalist in the passenger's seat, having spectated on live sex acts for the first time in his life, about a dozen solid hours' worth, is suffering not wholly agreeable reelings of the mind that he tries to cover for with ninnyish small talk.

"So that scene with Kayden seemed, ah, pretty enjoyable."

"Yeah," Deen says. "I always say sex is like soccer: It's fun and athletic, and you should do it with your friends."

Yes, I think. Right. Certainly. Here is a simple statement that Deen means pretty much as it sounds, but it also pithily expresses yet another reason why you or I will never be the sort of soccer player James Deen is. It's not just that he's got bigger, you know, feet than we do. It's that for you, on that night of enduring awkwardness when you went out for drinks with the woman in the adjacent cubicle and achieved your long-cherished fantasy of playing soccer with her, you did so not because you thought she was going to be this tremendously good soccer player. It was that you were thrilled that she found you sufficiently nonrevolting that she was willing to get on the field with you, which was a big consideration, because as you both knew, what makes the game so very, very exciting isn't its competitive physics but the conceit that the game is actually a high-velocity delivery system for privileged emotional knowledge of the other player's secret self. And that even if you're the sort of freebooting venereal Olympian who tries to play soccer with absolutely everything that moves, your compulsion to play is still ultimately grounded in the marrow-level conviction that the game matters in some way a good deal more complex and high-stakes than simple athletic fun.

But the remarkable thing about Deen is, I think, that he has managed to dissociate sex from emotional consequence,a feat of psychosexual contortionism he was limbering up for at an age when the rest of us had yet to tie our own shoelaces.

Q: So when did you decide to do porn?

A: Kindergarten. I remember I was walking home one day, and I found this magazine, I don't know, a Hustler or something, with people banging in it. I was enamored by it. I was like, I want to do this. I actually got in trouble in third or fourth grade. They were asking everybody what they wanted to be when they grew up, and I said I wanted to be a porn star. They didn't like that. They thought I was being a dick. I was like, "I'm not being a dick, it's just what I want to be."

But outside of porn, before he entered the industry, what else interested him? "Nothing. That's the thing. My whole life, I've never really found anything else that I've found interesting."

James Deen, whose real name is Bryan Sevilla, grew up in Pasadena, California. His parents are both, after a fashion, rocket scientists. His father is a mechanical engineer for NASA. His mother does data analysis for the space agency. Deen, contrary to our notion of porn stars as survivors of sexual trauma, does not recall any sexual abuse or destructive misadventures, other than a teacher who Deen says tried to molest him when he was 8 or 9, but Deen "punched his testicles a lot" and made good his escape.

Deen lost his virginity at age 12 during a sleepover at a Jewish camp. Not long after, in junior high school, he made enemies of the football team by having sex with a player's sister in the school pool during gym. He had some drug escapades in junior high. He spent a couple of years in outpatient rehab. Around age 15, he left high school and moved out and spent two years more or less homeless, hanging around with a crew of gutter punks. Relations with his parents remained reasonably cordial. They furnished him with a cell phone, and he periodically snuck into his mom's house to do laundry. (Deen's parents are divorced.)

At around 17, he moved in with his father. He was working at a Starbucks and taking classes at a community college when one evening he says he chanced upon a call-in radio program whose guest was the porn star Jenna Jameson. She imparted what was, for Deen, life-altering advice.

"So some guy calls in for like the millionth time and says, ‘I wanna do porn. How do I get into the industry?' And she's been listening to this shit all night. She's frustrated. She goes, ‘You wanna do porn? Go get a folding chair and sit in a room with twenty people and jerk off for an hour. And if you can keep hard, and when one of them yells "Come!" you can come in thirty seconds, then you can do porn.' "

Deen hearkened to these words. He began a self-styled apprenticeship in not-for-profit guerrilla pornography. "I started going to parties, and I'd bang girls in front of groups of people," he recalled. "I learned I could come on cue. I was told to come, and I'd come. I don't know how I do it. It has something to do with muscle control. It's easy for me."

In 2004 a stripper Deen knew introduced him to a casting agent who posted his naked picture on the World Wide Web. In short order, Deen was offered a role to be the recipient of something "more than a hand job but less than a blow job." He acquitted himself creditably. His career had begun. His agent thought "Clint Cunnilingus" was a poor choice of screen name. Bryan Sevilla instead became James Deen, inspired by the nickname he won in junior high school for the soigné manner in which he liked to pinch-cup a cigarette.

In due time, a director offered the young aspirant his first full scene. The wood was durable, the orgasm prompt. Deen had proved himself a fellow of Miss Jameson's calling. Jobs poured in. (Deen wouldn't disclose his earnings, but top male talent can command $800 to $1,000 a scene.)

Though you could not hire a lobbyist to boost for the porn industry more enthusiastically than James Deen, he does acknowledge that the life has its pitfalls. On our ride north, I mention what will be, for me, the least forgettable or pleasant image of the week I spend with him: that of Allie James posed with Steve Holmes's organ in a photo for her mother.

"Yeah, obviously she's damaged. I'm, like, getting pimped out when you were 9 so your brothers could smoke weed? That's not healthy. She's like Rick Santorum's wet dream, the poster child for how people in porn are damaged," Deen says. "But for every person like her, there's someone like, I'd like to say, me. I had a great childhood. My parents and I get along. I just like sex, and I like porn, and I think it's fun. I'm always terrified that someday I'm going to come to the realization that I've got some deep, dark secret, some terrifying, horrible experience where I'm going to be like, ‘I'm actually not normal. I'm a crazy person!' But it just doesn't seem to be the case."

The Santorum poster children are, as Deen has it, performers who "lose their real persona and become their porn persona, this party person who is obsessed with sex, who is constantly taking their clothes off."

I suggest to Deen that perhaps the reason Bryan Sevilla hasn't manifested persona slip when he became James Deen is that Sevilla—the kindergarten porn enthusiast, preteen industry aspirant, the public coupler at social functions—has always been James Deen.

"I'd agree with that," he says.

And on we roll, north on I-5, yours truly dozing off while Deen blares on his superb sound system, at 3,000 dBs, his favorite tune: "Yes" by LMFAO, whose refrain runs, Every day I see my dream.

···

James Deen arrives in San Francisco with the morning traffic. His destination is the Mission District headquarters of the sex conglomerate Kink.com. If Digital Playground is vanilla, Kink.com is decidedly rocky road. Kink's family of websites includes but is not limited to Hogtied.com, BoundGangBangs.com, ButtMachineBoys.com, BoundInPublic.com, PublicDisgrace.com, NakedKombat.com, WiredPussy.com, and ElectroSluts.com.

According to Deen, Kink is among the most profitable companies in the porn industry, owing to its extraordinarily loyal consumer base of fetishists. A fetish, Deen explains, is not a mere preference or lark but a controlling obsession. A fetishist cannot enjoy himself sexually unless he is observing, for example, someone's vagina getting jazzed with 110 volts of house current. "The people who watch it don't watch because they want to, they watch it because they need to," Deen says.

Content for Kink's assorted websites is mostly filmed on location at a former National Guard armory, a forbidding Moorish Revival fortress at 14th and Mission that Kink purchased in 2006 for $14.5 million. Today, Deen will be filming a scene in the armory's basement for EverythingButt.com. "It's about butts," Deen explains. "It's normally girl-girl. The girls play with each other, insert various objects into each other's rectums, and then I show up and bang them in their butts and call it a day. It's not one of my favorites, because there's not much actual sex."

For all of Kink's outré offerings, the armory actually feels a good deal less porny than the glitzy loaner mansion we were in last night. More Williamsburg than San Fernando Valley. People we pass in the hallways look like bike messengers, librarians, and assistant faculty in women's-studies departments.

The armory contains an uncountable number of studios made to simulate bars and dungeons and karate dojos. Deen makes his way to the basement. He cocks an ear to a studio door where the scene he'll be joining is already steaming along. Through the plywood, we can hear a woman voicing hysterical testimony as to the condition and surrendered proprietorship of her tuchus. "Whose ass is it?"

"It's your ass.... My ass is yours!"

Deen and I—haggard, malarial with sleep deprivation—doze nearby on a pair of sofas without a care for the deeds that have surely soiled the upholstery.

Within the hour, Deen is summoned to the set, which is a genuine industrial-age boiler room. It contains an actual boiler, a steel-frame single bed suggestive of an old-timey insane asylum, an equipment table bearing whips, a lengthy, diametrically graduated recto-probe, dildos, and an alligator's head. Personnel includes the director—a mild, soft-spoken man with fine Teutonic features—and a cameraman in a full jumpsuit as per OSHA regulations. There is also Isis Love, administrator of the anatomical stresses we were overhearing during our nap. Isis is a tawny Amazon with black sheeny hair and a black corsetish thing tailored to expose breasts like a pair of headlocked toddlers. The scene's operational subject is a young woman named Proxy Paige, a slightly mousy hipster type. Fishnets and silver bustier notwithstanding, she looks like a civilian. I'm worried about her.

Pregame particulars are attended to. Deen conducts a brief interview with Proxy Paige as to her personal boundaries. Proxy says she lately had some wisdom-tooth trouble on one side of her jaw and would prefer not to be slapped there. Anything else is cool. Then Deen, by way of small talk, recounts yesterday's Steve-Holmes-texting-the-fellatio-photo-to-Allie-James's-mother anecdote, to which Proxy Paige replies that she would like "to fuck [Steve] and his son so bad it makes me uncomfortable," which assures me that whatever further abuse the afternoon holds for Proxy Paige, she can hack it just fine.

Lights, camera—before filming begins, the scene founders. Deen is rigid and all, but syntactical confusion halts the choreography. "When you come in," Isis says to Deen, "I'll be licking her ass, getting her ass all wet so you can fuck her while she's sucking your cock."

Action: The scene begins with Proxy kneeling on the floor and fellating. Isis and Deen stand on either side of her such that Isis, by humping the back of Proxy's head, compels Proxy to repeatedly spindle her gullet on Deen's person. That goes on for a while, and then Deen, wang still endentured, sort of drags Proxy over to the bed in a maneuver reminiscent of what we used to refer to in junior high school as a "bulldog." Isis Love stands close at hand, emitting a faultfinding commentary of ungentle encouragement, "Keep it in your mouth, slut," etc., etc.

Um, hey. You out there, do you seriously want me to keep describing this stuff? Really? Because it gets a lot worse from here. All right, you asked for it.

"Okay!" says Isis Love. "Time for the human centipede." The "human centipede" = Deen sodomizing Proxy Paige while Proxy Paige buries her face between the russet buttocks of Isis Love in a snuffling pantomime of a "Kilroy was here" graffito. Isis at regular intervals hocks lubricative loogies into the pistonworks going full-bore at the base of Proxy's spine. Every now and again Isis disengages Deen's cruller so that the camera can get a load of Proxy's keister, which footage you should track down if you happen to adore the sight of a yawning, defanged lamprey with strep throat.

From there, in flagrant contravention of the USDA's Safe Food Handling Fact Sheet, Deen plunges his unwashed tuber straightaway into Proxy's mouth. A set of chain-linked nipple clamps are attached to poor Proxy. Deen yanks roguishly on the chain while Isis covers Proxy's nose and mouth, depriving her of oxygen. While Deen pays a return visit to Proxy's service entrance, Isis Love manages to slip a searching finger or two in there as well.

At this point, an unlearned onlooker might adjudge Proxy's hindmost to be quite adequately crammed, perhaps even crammed to excess. But Deen, whose right hand is stuffed into Proxy's mouth noodlin'-for-flatheads-style, manages to wedge a few additional digits into Proxy's exhaust port.

"You are so fucking sick and evil and twisted and fucked-up," Isis says to Deen. "I fucking love you."

Proxy's breathing is stertorous, rapid, pre-infarctatory. Between takes she's asked if she's okay. She nods. Her eyes leak little tears, which Deen wipes away with the quick strokes of an experienced cut man. Before long, Deen is instructed to ejaculate, which he does, with dispatch, on Proxy's face.

And cut! We're clear! Thank heavens.

Deen flees the set in search of a shower. Isis and Proxy sit abed for a postgame interview.

Isis Love: Proxy, how you feeling right now?

Proxy Paige:[panting] Good! Worked over.

Isis: Was it everything you expected it to be?

Proxy: Yes, and I got to do a lot of things I hadn't done before.

[Proxy is breathing heavily. Her voice is fragile, muted with restrained emotion.]

Isis: Do you want to cry right now? Come here, munchkin.

Isis Love holds Proxy Paige while the brine flows from her eyes. "It was a really good day," Proxy says, her voice splintering. "I don't know why I'm crying. It was really extreme, and I did a lot of things I don't normally do."

"You're so cute," says Isis. "What was the best part of the day? Your favorite part."

"You fisting me," says Proxy. "I've always wanted to be, like, fully fisted in the ass. I felt like that would cross some sort of, like, anal threshold, and I finally did it. It was intense."

"Can I have a tissue for my munchkin pie?" Isis calls to the crew. Isis Love cradles Proxy Paige, and Proxy does the only thing one can do when you've survived such an afternoon as this, which is to weep and grin and weep.

···

As soon as he's out of the shower, Deen aims the F-150 Vegasward. We're on the road by 7 p.m. The trip's supposed to take nine or ten hours, but James Deen's preferred number of miles per hour at which to drive is one hundred. We make it in six hours and change.

On the darkened highway, we discuss Deen's life offscreen. Does James Deen have a girlfriend? He does not, not as of this writing, anyway. For six years he dated the alt-porn innovatrix Joanna Angel, but seeing civilians is generally rather ved. "Either they get freaked-out about what I do before they get a chance to get to know me, or they just want to have sex like one time so they can say they fucked a porn star."

Deen's boyfriend-girlfriend-type arrangements, therefore, have generally been with other sex-industry professionals. In theory, says Deen, "when you're in a relationship with someone in the industry, all of the jealousy and everything should fall away." But of course, when you and your significant other are having sex with third, fourth, fifth, etc., parties for money every day, other complexities crop up. I promised Deen I would not get into the interpersonal specifics he disclosed on our many hours road-tripping together, but I will say that his relationships have been plagued by complications that have never troubled the marriage of Ann and Mitt Romney. Lately, having sex off-camera has been sort of fraught. "Personal private sex is almost too intimate now," he says, citing a recent threesome when he was "like almost hyperemotional, because it was personal sex without any cameras."

At 8 a.m., Deen arrives at a shoot for Brazzers, a Lumbourg-based pornography concern that traffics in more traditional fare than Kink.com, with such online properties as PornstarsLikeItBig.com, MilfsLikeItBig.com, TeensLikeItBig.com, MommyGotBoobs.com, BabyGotBoobs.com, and other improvisations on these core motifs.

The studio is out by the airport, in a structure you could confidently nominate in a global architectural showdown for World's Most Nondescript Building. Inside is a labyrinth of offices in various states of half-assed theatrical reinvention as hospital or hotel or school rooms. Casually scattered about are props from old shoots: a cardboard retail booth bearing the exhortation eat a sister's pie, a trombone, a sorority paddle stenciled with the words cunta beta deltas, a Sawzall with a dildo fid to the bayonet end.

Deen is greeted by the director, who goes by the name Vic Lagina. Vic is tall, phlegmatic, wearing a half-sleeve baseball shirt through which large, hard pectorals are legible. Vic Lagina gives James Deen the rundown on today's script, which is Lagina's own creation. It's a 1980s rock 'n' roll-biopic spoof with Deen playing the part of a dissolute rocker. "Dewey Cocks" is his character's name.

For today's role, Deen is costumed in an unctuous black sternum-length wig, a slinky black halter top, and a pair of white tiger-print tights that accentuate the acreage of Deen's organ. "Man, those pants make your dick look big," observes Vic Lagina.

As another member of the Brazzers crew points out, Deen's stature helps enhance the appearance of genital yardage. "It's like putting twenty-twos on a Civic."

Quiet on the set. The first shot is this: Deen leaning against a wall to simulate an existential moment backstage. A stagehand comes along to urge him to perform. Then Dewey Cocks's manager (a gigantic black man called in the script, hilariously, WHITEY) intercedes with this line of dialogue: "Dewey Cocks don't go on the stage until he recalls all the girls he has had sex with in his lifetime."

"I'm going to try going back chronologically," Deen tells the crew from his position on the wall. After one of many takes, Deen relays the total: "I got back, like, two weeks! I don't know if I can go farther."

With the framing device in place, Deen spends most of the day's remainder in plural intercourse with one Tiffany Brookes and one Jessica Jaymes, who are portraying his groupies. Miss Jaymes is a ten-year vet whose huge blister-pack protrusions are somewhat at odds with her springbok svelteness. It would be a mischaracterization to say that she is a supernova of youthful enthusiasm about the project at hand. Today's shoot, as she puts it, "ain't my first fuckin' rodeo, bra'." When she meets Deen, clad in the foul wig and tights, her response is (to Deen's unarticulated pique) "I gotta fuck you in that? Do you have to fuck in that thing [meaning the wig] the whole time?"

Deen allows that he does.

"And I have to pretend I like it? Oh, give it to me, hairy daddy," Miss Jaymes says with a dry laugh.

Okay, action! From the start, the offscreen chemistry is poor. When the camera stops rolling, all intimacy ceases. Miss Jaymes and Miss Brookes are old friends and act like a pair of collegial waitresses who have worked at the same cheap diner for many unwondrous years. Between takes they carp lightheartedly at each other for dragging ass on the shift.

"You didn't suck as much dick as I did."

"You gonna help me out with this thing?"

"God, I want to brush my teeth."

"I'm eating fucking bad wig hair."

Deen apologizes. "It came from a bag."

"So did I," replies Miss Jaymes.

Deen eventually gets a little peevish. Miss Jaymes, in particular, attends to him so minimally that, in a subtle huff, Deen quits the scene to wring himself back to full rigor.

When the sex ends, Deen is permitted to trash the hotel room. He sets about the destruction so ardently—tearing wainscoting, shattering the television—that one guesses the expression of frustration is partly genuine. On the drive back to our hotel, Deen confirms his discontent with the shoot.

"I mean, the first thing [Jessica Jaymes] said to me was, ‘Oh, my God, I have to fuck you?' You could say that in a nicer way. ‘Your outfit is really silly looking. Oh, my God, I can't believe they're making you wear that—that's hilarious....' It's just that she wanted to make it clear that ‘we are working. This is a job, and I will not sexually enjoy myself.' She basically wanted to do the least amount of sex as humanly possible.... But it's fine. The product'll turn out good. On-camera it'll look like everybody had a great time."

···

That night Deen holes up for fourteen hours. Midday finds him chipper and not the least bit down in the mouth about having to schlep to yet another loaner mansion to mate on-camera with yet another couple of women.

Today, Deen will be playing the pornographic actor and teen idol James Deen in a word-for-word send-up of the scaremongering Nightline spot about Deen's popularity with the teen set. Deen, for his part, has mid feelings about the piece. Anchor Terry Moran, whose sneering opinings bracketed the story, is, according to Deen, "just a dick.... Fuck that guy." Yet he concedes, "They could have made me look bad, between all my ramblings and the dumb shit that I say, and they didn't."

Playing the part of ABC's Cecilia Vega is a teeteringly thin Portuguese woman named Erica, whose immaculate blondeness and avian features lend her a passing resemblance to Callista Gingrich.

And "Quiet—rolling!" Deen sits on a counter stool while Erica tries with tongue-twisting effort to recite hardballs from the Nightline interview, e.g., "So you have massive female following young womans. What you say to that?"

"If these women are looking for pornographic material on the Internet, they're obviously into sex," says Deen. "They like sex. They want to explore their sexuality, which isn't necessarily a bad thing."

After the foregoing days, any normal man would view the prospect of more tungsten-lit sex with strangers the way you might view a sixty-ounce steak after a hot-dog-eating contest. But we are beginning to learn that Deen, despite his bankable Everyman persona, is by no means a normal man. He alights from the stool with a grin.

So what happens next? Oh, some oralness, some conjugal tusslings, some other things, dear reader, that after a week mooching around on pornography sets I no longer find astonishing enough to set down in print. The soul is weary. The pen is weary. I am a little abashed, a little ashamed, for having described so much in the preceding paragraphs, to have made myself your Vic Lagina, your Robby D., your personal pornographer.

At this point, in answer to the query I posed at the start of our voyage, I can sincerely say that I would rather drink a mugful of live ticks than switch places with James Deen.

You're shittin' me! you say. Why? Well, not only because being impelled to couple every day with a stranger before a room of onlookers seems like an experiment dreamed up by Martian scientists. And not only because the Groundhog Day-ish sameness would, I think, accumulate to a monotony akin to a career in oyster shucking. Ultimately, for this reporter, I would be frightened that if I weren't able to recall the names of sexual partners beyond the previous two weeks, ideals like intimacy and love would begin to seem gooey and absurd, and a terrible unexamined loneliness would become the natural condition of my life. I do not voice this sentiment to Deen. It would offend him. It would come across as prudishly un-"sex-positive" and critical of Deen and the industry he holds dear.

But he would be missing the point. What I am saying is that we may well owe a debt of gratitude to James Deen. That just as Superman makes plain why the rest of us should not jump off buildings, the extraordinary Deen and his Kryptonian psychosexual constitution illustrate why the ordinary man should not try to peg everything with opposable thumbs. All day, every day, James Deen is fucking the planet senseless so that the rest of us don't have to try to. Indeed, when the confines of monogamy begin to feel drab and claustrophobic, Deen and his adventures are just a track pad away. By the time your wife gets back from the store, you, feeling a little shabby, a little guilty, will be so glad to see her that you will never want to look upon another naked woman for at least ninety minutes or so. (Incidentally, you have the permission of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which lately disclosed that in our age of rampant web-based autoeroticism, divorce has in fact declined over the past fifteen years.)

But for now, I will speak no more of meaningless balling. From here on out, I will speak only of feelings and human connectedness.

Okay, then. So. How is James Deen feeling? How is his human connectedness? I am happy to report that James Deen is feeling good, because even now, in a candid moment when the cameras are not rolling and no one is professionally obliged to have sex with him, he is lying on a black leather sectional, actively connected to Lizz Tayler in the spoon position, and he is also connected to Miss Erica, whose cooter he is jabbing with a nimble big toe. Today so much feeling, so much connectedness, abounds on the set that even after Deen's orgasm has been videoed for perpetuity, he loiters on the sofa with Miss Erica, who is grasping Deen's ficelle between the arches of her feet and laughing in a musical way.

"You like me, don't you?" Deen asks her.

She nods and chirps.

"Good day," says Deen. "Really good day."

···

And then, after a long, arduous, and ordinary sort of week, it is time for James Deen to shower up, climb into his Ford F-150 Raptor, and head west through the desert to the horizon of his homing. He has a shoot in Los Angeles tomorrow morning, yet the drive is a mere four hours and will put him back in time to spend an evening away from pornography. Rolling through Barstow, he places a call to some old pals in Pasadena, civilians, friends from his life before. Are they up for a visit this evening? Yes, they are, but there is an issue. Even among his trusted cronies, Deen's screen persona dogs him. A friend's sister is part of the hangout crew tonight, and the friend is rightly concerned that Deen will take the sister to bed.

"Look, I'm not gonna try to fuck your sister," Deen says assuringly. There is some dubious squawking from the other party. "I promise, I'm not gonna try to fuck your sister." It is not enough. "Look, I'm not gonna try to fuck your sister!"Exasperation gets the better of him. At last James Deen must speak the truth:

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